AMD Athlon II X4 620 & 630: The First $99 Quad Core CPU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 16, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
SYSMark 2007 Performance
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.
If we only look at the AMD numbers in this chart, there's a pretty nice lineup going on here. The Athlon II X2 250 is slower than the Athlon II X4 620/630, which is slower than the Phenom II X3 730 and all are slower than the Phenom II X4 955. The performance lines up with the pricing, so all is good.
The problem with these cheap quad-cores has always been that you give up a lot in order to get four cores at a low price. The Athlon II X4 appears to break the mold however. The Athlon II X4 620 is priced at $99 and it performs like a $99 CPU. With the exception of the Core 2 Duo E7500 whose high clock speed makes it do unsually well here, the 620 is balanced. You get a reasonably high clock speed and enough cache to be competitive, both at a good price.
You'll see in the individual tests below that performance varies between competitive and underwhelming depending on the task. Anything that can take advantage of four cores does well, otherwise the smaller L2s of the Athlon II X4 hurt it a bit.
In applications that aren't well threaded, you'll see the Athlon II X4 perform less than stellar - but the same is true for all lower end quad-core CPUs. Even the Q8200 is outperformed by the E6300 here. Situations like this are validation for Intel's aggressive turbo modes on Lynnfield.
Any strenuous video encoding however will seriously favor the Athlon II X4. Here we find the $99 620 tying the Core 2 Quad Q8200, and the 630 outperforming it - all at a lower price.
We're back to needing higher clock speeds and larger caches to compete. Being a quad-core processor isn't easy.
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The0ne - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Whether you like to believe it or not, crippling or, in a nicer way, not release some of the features is pretty common in both software and hardware environments. Whether the decision was due to money, managerial ignorance, or a time-line it is still a feature that is not in the product that could be there.If you consider putting all features, which is impossible btw, then you run into issues where the consumer or market doesn't even need them. We have USBs, wireless, biometric security available in one of our product but 95% of the market could care less. They are still on serial lines and are uneducated on newer technologies. Most city halls are like this that is why you see plain old switching voting systems still in place and the occasional typewriter.
The0ne - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
You mean like the I5?andrenb91 - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
it's just a cpu...I'll buy it when I need it, my amd athlon 4850e and intel pentium dual-core e5200 still good enoughMrCommunistGen - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Anyone know where you can get these? If not yet available, then when? I have a friend who needs a new computer, and the AII X4 620 would be a pretty good fit for him. I was somewhat grudgingly recommending the Ph II X2 550, but the X4 620 seems to offer much more balanced performance.pervisanathema - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
These results are meaningless. The intel CPUs should be forced to run 24x7 at their highest possible turbo speed. To do otherwise let's AMD lose by a smaller margin.i'm going to stay here saying the same until hell freezes.
i'm not going to accept under clocked results presented as if they were stock results.
this is a casus belli.
i mean it.
fitten - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
Heh... I see what you did there ;) I'm with you!johnsonx - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
lolClownPuncher - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
I see what you did there! Nice jobExar3342 - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
For $50 more, you get a much more energy efficient and faster processor. I would only recommend this quad to those with a MB that supports it, they need an upgrade, and they don't have much cash.AMD can't be making much money off these processors...
bji - Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - link
"For $50 more" means "for 50% more" in this case. It's kind of ridiculous to talk about the difference of $50 in this context as if it's trivial. Those costs are not remotely comparable, so the implication that you might as well just spend $50 more to get the faster/more efficient processor is not justified by your statements.I personally always do target $150 for a processor price when building a new system - this is a habit I got into with my very first build, using a Pentium 100 which at the time cost $150. This means that a $200 processor which has better performance is not even in the realm of consideration for me, even though it is "only $50 more", which in this case, is an even smaller percentage increase than in the case you are talking about.
Just in case I haven't made my point abundantly clear: you can't recommend spending $50 more for someone who has budgeted $100 for the processor. You have to compare similarly priced CPUs. I would like to see more comparisons with the Phenom II 550 BE for that reason.